The Dark Nights, Pt. 1

The Habit of Heartfulness

English Transcript:

The spiritual journey is a process that parallelsthe process of life. If you have to let go of lower formsor ideas of perceiving realitythat are proper to infants and childrenin order to get to mature views of reality,then why be surprised if you have to do the samein the spiritual plane?

That’s really what the dark nights are about.They’re a passive infusion of divine lovethat assists us to do what we are too weak to do,or haven’t got quite the guts to do under our ownhuman initiative, which is to facethe things in ourselves that are obstacles to growthand to allow them to die byletting go of them.

What was good is preserved or integrated into a higher viewof Christ, or of God. All that’s let go of is the childishnessor the undue identification with human propsthat are no longer useful tools in the spiritual journey.These served us at one level of our journey,but now have to be laid aside.We have to pick up a new set of tools proportionateto the new wisdom or realitythat we’re dealing with.

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The words that I speak to youI do not speak on my own.The Father who dwells in meis doing his works.John 14: 10

Selections from the works of Fr. Thomas Keating for further studyon the nature of divine love that flows from divine union: